Are eight-hour days, other benefits and the right to unionize that unreasonable?

It's not just the hard, vital work of agriculture that has its unyielding cycles and predictable seasons. So, too, does the work of politics — not nearly as difficult and rarely as fruitful.

On New York's farms comes spring planting and hope of a harvest that's months away. But at the state Capitol, we fear, the Senate is headed into another season in which all hope of humane working conditions for the people who toil on New York's farms will wither on the vine.

Last week, as if on the cue of a celestial calendar, the state Assembly voted largely along party lines to give farmworkers what any worker in a civilized industrial society should enjoy. That is, an eight-hour workday, the right to collective bargaining, unemployment and disability benefits, and protection under the state sanitary code.

The seed was planted, in other words, for the Senate to do what it always does. Its work yields a meager harvest.

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Farmworkers, you see, matter less there than the propaganda of the farm lobby.

Just listen to the state Farm Bureau, which calls the Assembly's support for such basic rights "a vote against New York's hard-working farm families and the farmworkers employed."

Listen, too, as it denounces seemingly everyone who would dare tell the Senate that its years of disregard for farmworkers is shameful.

"Keep in mind," says the Farm Bureau, "the advocacy groups behind this legislation include unions, college students and downstate members of the Legislature who do not understand ... the realities of providing food for our tables."

Not a word there about the people who do the labor of delivering that food to New Yorkers' households. Never mind the farmworkers who dare to act as advocates for their own and support what amounts to an economic bill of rights — even if they tend not to be eligible to vote against the politicians who can hurt them or make campaign contributions to the ones who can help them.

A debate that should have been settled by now needs to give new consideration to the admonition of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver: These people are farmworkers, not farm animals.

Decent treatment of them won't imperil agriculture — a critical, multibillion-dollar a year industry in New York. What the Farm Bureau and other opponents of farmworkers' rights are so loath to acknowledge is that farming can continue to thrive even as it protects the very people who make that possible. A state Senate that's never been very bothered by the mistreatment of farmworkers should explain why California can do the right thing but New York can't.

Farmworkers' rights are one of the last things on the agenda for a Senate that's just a few weeks away from declaring that its work is done for the year. Not bad work — serving in a scandal-plagued Legislature for a minimum of $79,500 a year. To head off on summer break while leaving farmworkers subject to such exploitation would be an act of ignobility.